Title: Crescendo of the virtuoso: spectacle, skill, and self-promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution 
Author: Metzner, Paul 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European  Studies
Publisher's Description: During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of modernism in Russian architecture 
Author: Brumfield, William Craft 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Russian and Eastern European  Studies
Publisher's Description: The dramatic transformation of Russian architecture from the 1880s to the 1917 revolution reflected the profound changes in Russian society as it entered the modern industrial age. William Craft Brumfield examines the extraordinary diversity of architectural styles in this period and traces the search by architects and critics for a "unifying idea" that would define a new architecture. Generously illustrated with archival materials and with the author's own superb photographs, this is the first comprehensive study by a Western scholar of a neglected period in European architectural and cultural history.Brumfield explores the diverse styles of Russian modernism in part by analyzing the contemporary theoretical debate about them: the relation between technology and style, the obligation of architecture to society, and the role of architecture as an expression of national identity. Steeped in controversy, Russian modernism at the beginning of the century foreshadowed the radical restructuring of architectural form in the Soviet Union during the two decades after the revolution. This authoritative work provides a new understanding of Russian architecture's last brief entrepreneurial episode and offers insight on our own era, when individual freedom and initiative may once again find expression in Russian architecture.   [brief]
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Title: Antonia Canova and the politics of patronage in revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe
Author: Johns, Christopher M. S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Art History | European  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: The Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) was Europe's most celebrated artist from the end of the ancien régime to the early years of the Restoration, an era when the traditional relationship between patrons and artists changed drastically. Christopher M. S. Johns's refreshingly original study explores a neglected facet of Canova's career: the effects of patrons, patronage, and politics on his choice of subjects and manner of working. While other artists produced art in the service of the state, Canova resisted the blandishments of the political powers that commissioned his works.Johns uses letters, diaries, and biographies to establish a political personality for Canova as an individual and an artist of international reputation. Though he had patrons as diverse as the pope, Napoleon, the Austrian Hapsburgs, the Prince Regent of Great Britain, and the Republic of Venice, Canova remained steadily employed and did so without controversy. A conservative and a Catholic, he devised a strategy that enabled him to work for patrons who were avowed enemies while remaining true to the cultural and artistic heritage of his Italian homeland. Using myth and funerary images and avoiding portraiture, he disguised the meanings behind his works and thus avoided their being identified with any political purpose.Johns greatly enhances our understanding of Canova's place in European art and political history, and in showing the influence of censorship, display, visual narrative, and propaganda, he highlights issues as contentious today as they were in Canova's time.   [brief]
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Title: The beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris 
Author: Kete, Kathleen
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European  Studies
Publisher's Description: Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie.Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding - all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world - it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection.Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class.   [brief]
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Title: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra
Author: Taruskin, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Russian and Eastern European  Studies
Publisher's Description: This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music.During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music.Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity - Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces . Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism" - the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art - and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music.Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed.Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.   [brief]
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Title: Russia's last capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European  Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1921 Lenin surprised foreign observers and many in his own Party, by calling for the legalization of private trade and manufacturing. Within a matter of months, this New Economic Policy (NEP) spawned many thousands of private entrepreneurs, dubbed Nepmen. After delineating this political background, Alan Ball turns his attention to the Nepmen themselves, examining where they came from, how they fared in competition with the socialist sector of the economy, their importance in the Soviet economy, and the consequences of their "liquidation" at the end of the 1920s. Alan Ball's history of this experiment with capitalism is strikingly relevant to current efforts toward economic reform in the USSR.   [brief]
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Title: Leningrad: shaping a Soviet city 
Author: Ruble, Blair A 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Russian and Eastern European  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Throughout much of this century, cities around the world have sought to gain control over their urban destinies through concerted government action. Nowhere has this process of state intervention gone further than in the Soviet Union. This volume explores the ways in which local and regional political, economic, and cultural leaders in Leningrad determine the physical and socioeconomic contours of their city and region within such a centralized economic and political environment.The author examines four major policy initiatives that have emerged in Leningrad since the 1950s - physical planning innovations, integrated scientific-production associations, vocational education reform, and socioeconomic planning - and that have been anchored in attempts to plan and manage metropolitan Leningrad. Each initiative illuminates the bureaucratic and political strategies employed to obtain economic objectives, as well as the bureaucratic patterns which distinguish market and non-market experiences. The boundaries for autonomous action by local Soviet politicians, planners, and managers emerge through this inquiry.   [brief]
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Title: Shaping history: ordinary people in European politics, 1500-1700 
Author: Te Brake, Wayne Ph
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | European  Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them. Shaping History shows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne te Brake's outstanding synthesis builds on the many studies of popular political action in specific settings and conflicts, locating the interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. But, as Te Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events. Offering a compelling alternative to traditionally elite-centered accounts of territorial state formation in Europe, this book calls attention to the variety of ways ordinary people have molded and shaped their own political histories.   [brief]
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Title: Transforming settler states: communal conflict and internal security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe 
Author: Weitzer, Ronald John
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: European  Studies | Politics | Sociology | African Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: In the past two decades, several settler regimes have collapsed and others seem increasingly vulnerable. This study examines the rise and demise of two settler states with particular emphasis on the role of repressive institutions of law and order. Drawing on field research in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, Ronald Weitzer traces developments in internal security structures before and after major political transitions. He concludes that thoroughgoing transformation of a repressive security apparatus seems to be an essential, but often overlooked, precondition for genuine democracy.In an instructive comparative analysis, Weitzer points out the divergent development of initially similar governmental systems. For instance, since independence in 1980, the government of Zimbabwe has retained and fortified basic features of the legal and organizational machinery of control inherited from the white Rhodesian state, and has used this apparatus to neutralize obstacles to the installation of a one-party state. In contrast, though liberalization is far from complete. The British government has succeeded in reforming important features of the old security system since the abrupt termination of Protestant, Unionist rule in Northern Ireland in 1972. The study makes a novel contribution to the scholarly literature on transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in its fresh emphasis on the pivotal role of police, military, and intelligence agencies in shaping political developments.   [brief]
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Title: Moral communities: the culture of class relations in the Russian printing industry, 1867-1907 
Author: Steinberg, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European  Studies
Publisher's Description: This valuable study offers a rare perspective on the social and political crisis in late Imperial Russia. Mark D. Steinberg focuses on employers, supervisors, and workers in the printing industry as it evolved from a state-dependent handicraft to a capitalist industry. He explores class relations and the values, norms, and perceptions with which they were made meaningful. Using archival and printed sources, Steinberg examines economic changes, workplace relations, professional organizations, unions, strikes, and political activism, as well as shop customs, trade festivals, and everyday life. In rich detail he describes efforts to build a community of masters and men united by shared interests and moral norms. The collapse of this ideal in the face of growing class conflict is also explored, giving a full view of an important moment in Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European  Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: forgery and betrayal in eighteenth-century London
Author: Andrew, Donna T 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European  Studies | European History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd tells the remarkable story of a complex forgery uncovered in London in 1775. Like the trials of Martin Guerre and O.J. Simpson, the Perreau-Rudd case--filled with scandal, deceit, and mystery--preoccupied a public hungry for sensationalism. Peopled with such familiar figures as John Wilkes, King George III, Lord Mansfield, and James Boswell, this story reveals the deep anxieties of this period of English capitalism. The case acts as a prism that reveals the hopes, fears, and prejudices of that society. Above all, this episode presents a parable of the 1770s, when London was the center of European finance and national politics, of fashionable life and tell-all journalism, of empire achieved and empire lost. The crime, a hanging offense, came to light with the arrest of identical twin brothers, Robert and Daniel Perreau, after the former was detained trying to negotiate a forged bond. At their arraignment they both accused Daniel's mistress, Margaret Caroline Rudd, of being responsible for the crime. The brothers' trials coincided with the first reports of bloodshed in the American colonies at Lexington and Concord and successfully competed for space in the newspapers. From March until the following January, people could talk of little other than the fate of the Perreaus and the impending trial of Mrs. Rudd. The participants told wildly different tales and offered strikingly different portraits of themselves. The press was filled with letters from concerned or angry correspondents. The public, deeply divided over who was guilty, was troubled by evidence that suggested not only that fair might be foul, but that it might not be possible to decide which was which. While the decade of the 1770s has most frequently been studied in relation to imperial concerns and their impact upon the political institutions of the day, this book draws a different portrait of the period, making a cause célèbre its point of entry. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly presented, it offers both a vivid panorama of London and a gauge for tracking the shifting social currents of the period.   [brief]
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Title: Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilization
Author: Kotkin, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community.Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life.Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish icons: art and society in modern Europe
Author: Cohen, Richard I
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Jewish Studies | European  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. The interaction of Jews with the visual arts takes place, as Cohen says, in a vast gallery of prints, portraits, books, synagogue architecture, ceremonial art, modern Jewish painting and sculpture, political broadsides, monuments, medals, and memorabilia. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers.   [brief]
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Title: To craft democracies: an essay on democratic transitions 
Author: Di Palma, Giuseppe
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Russian and Eastern European  Studies | History
Publisher's Description: Is democracy a hot-house plant? Is it difficult to transplant it into new soil? The fall of so many dictatorships in the last few years - first in Southern Europe, then in Latin America, now in Eastern Europe - opens new, more optimistic perspectives on democratic development. The crises of dictatorships and the search for a new political order offer fertile ground for an examination of how best to effect democratic transitions.By focusing on the objective conditions that make democracy probable, sociological and historical theories of democracy often lose sight of what is possible. Here Giuseppe Di Palma instead explores those conciliatory political undertakings that political actors on all sides now engage in to make the improbable possible. His emphasis is on political crafting: in regard to constitutional choices, to alliances and convergences between contestants, to trade-offs, to the pacing of the transitions. Di Palma also examines the reasons - stalemate, the high cost of repression, a loss of goals, international constraints and inducements - that may motivate incumbents and nondemocratic political actors to accept democracy, even in those cases, as in Central America and Eastern Europe, where acceptance would seem least likely.An original and imaginative work that, in the light of recent transitions, challenges our assumptions about fledgling democracies and breaks new theoretical ground, To Craft Democracies will appeal to anyone interested in the way we forge our political communities today.   [brief]
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Title: Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922-1945
Author: Ben-Ghiat, Ruth
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: European  Studies | History | Intellectual History | European History
Publisher's Description: Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that - at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities - Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.   [brief]
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Title: Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics 
Author: Krajewski, Bruce 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | European  Studies
Publisher's Description: Certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer also influenced the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on Gadamer's writings about ancient Greek and modern German philosophy, the relevance of his work for other disciplines is only now beginning to be properly considered and understood. In an effort to address this slant, this volume brings together many prominent scholars to assess, re-evaluate, and question Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, as well as his place in intellectual history. The book includes a recent essay by Gadamer on "the task of hermeneutics," as well as essays by distinguished contributors including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Gerald Bruns, Georgia Warnke, and many others. The contributors situate Gadamer's views in surprising ways and show that his writings speak to a range of contemporary debates - from constitutional questions to issues of modern art. A controversial final section attempts to uncover and clarify Gadamer's history in relation to National Socialism. More an investigation and questioning than a celebration of this venerable and profoundly influential philosopher, this collection will become a catalyst for any future rethinking of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a significant starting place for rereading and reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer.   [brief]
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Title: War stories: the search for a usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European  Studies | German Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that - according to some contemporary accounts - were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts.   [brief]
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Title: Feminism and politics: a comparative perspective 
Author: Gelb, Joyce 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Gender Studies | European  Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: This incisive work provides a comparative political analysis of the women's movement in England, the United States, and Sweden from the 1960s to the present. Based on extensive interviews in each of the three countries, Feminism and Politics focuses not only on the internal dynamics of the movements themselves, but also on the relationship of feminist politics to the political process as a whole and to the economic and ideological context.Gelb finds that differences in the feminist movements in each country relate to systemic and cultural differences. In Britain the closed nature of the political system has greatly narrowed opportunities for feminist political activities. By contrast, the feminist movement in the United States has enjoyed relative autonomy and success, primarily because it has been unconstrained by the necessity of working through existing groups such as unions and political parties. In Sweden Gelb finds an anomalous situation in which the state has implemented many feminist policies but has allowed little ideological or political space for an autonomous movement.In its scope and analysis, Feminism and Politics offers a valuable new perspective on women's political activities.   [brief]
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Title: The making of revolutionary Paris
Author: Garrioch, David
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | European  Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: The sights, sounds, and smells of life on the streets and in the houses of eighteenth-century Paris rise from the pages of this marvelously anecdotal chronicle of a perpetually alluring city during one hundred years of extraordinary social and cultural change. An excellent general history as well as an innovative synthesis of new research, The Making of Revolutionary Paris combines vivid portraits of individual lives, accounts of social trends, and analyses of significant events as it explores the evolution of Parisian society during the eighteenth century and reveals the city's pivotal role in shaping the French Revolution. David Garrioch rewrites the origins of the Parisian Revolution as the story of an urban metamorphosis stimulated by factors such as the spread of the Enlightenment, the growth of consumerism, and new ideas about urban space. With an eye on the broad social trends emerging during the century, he focuses his narrative on such humble but fascinating aspects of daily life as traffic congestion, a controversy over the renumbering of houses, and the ever-present dilemma of where to bury the dead. He describes changes in family life and women's social status, in religion, in the literary imagination, and in politics. Paris played a significant role in sparking the French Revolution, and in turn, the Revolution changed the city, not only its political structures but also its social organization, gender ideologies, and cultural practices. This book is the first to look comprehensively at the effect of the Revolution on city life. Based on the author's own research in Paris and on the most current scholarship, this absorbing book takes French history in new directions, providing a new understanding of the Parisian and the European past.   [brief]
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